Frank Rich

Jon Stewart's Perfect Pitch

Published: April 20, 2003

(Page 2 of 2)

In an interview with Mr. Stewart and Ben Karlin, the show's co-executive producer, I asked why material like this has failed, as yet, to make "The Daily Show" a target of the patriotism police who have tried to impose a rigid wartime speech code on most of American discourse, pop culture included. "It's different coming from us than the Dixie Chicks," said Mr. Karlin, who was formerly an editor of the satirical newspaper The Onion. "It's more expected that we're going to process a news event and have a take on it." Maybe, but it's also a matter of tone. As Laura Miller has observed in Salon, Mr. Stewart is not self-righteous — an increasingly rare quality right now. This is a time when antiwar voices have often felt (not without reason) that they have to be strident to be heard above the military music, and the keepers of jingoistic political correctness feel they must be just as shrill to shout them down. "The Daily Show" is anomalously rational. "Our audience can watch without feeling like we're grabbing them by the lapels and shouting `This is the truth!' in their faces," said Mr. Stewart. "Our show is about not knowing what the truth is."

"The Daily Show" prides itself on its bipartisanship. "People ask, `Why aren't you really making fun of Democrats right now?' " Mr. Stewart says, "and we say we'd love to if we knew where they were." But what makes the show original is that it tends not to even recognize party-line categories. In Mr. Stewart's view, "Liberals and conservatives are two gangs who have intimidated rational, normal thinking beings into not having a voice on television or in the culture." He argues that they are on their way to extinction: "Liberals and conservatives are paradigms that mean nothing to anyone other than the media. Liberals were relevant when there was a giant cause to fight for — civil rights. They accomplished it so well that the only thing left for them to do now is to get women into Augusta. So what are they? And what are Rush and the Ann Coulters battling? They're still fighting the cold war. You know, Russia gave up a long time ago."

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Mr. Stewart caused a stir by shunning comedy entirely. He shut down "The Daily Show" for a week, then returned with a tearful monologue about the attack on his city. "This time," Mr. Karlin says, "we all thought at the beginning there's no way we're going to be able to do the war." The default position was to stick with jokes about the media. But the war itself increasingly became the subject, and the jokes about President Bush depart from the late-nite clichés. The Bush on "Saturday Night Live" may still be frat-boy simple, wishing that "Shock and Awe" had been named "Tango & Cash," but "The Daily Show" sees a slicker operator. After the president told the Iraqis in a subtitled TV address that they were "a good and gifted people" who "deserve better than tyranny and corruption and torture chambers," Mr. Stewart cited it as proof that "condescension knows no borders." Nor is the show taking at face value the White House's professed devotion to postwar Iraq. "We won," said Mr. Colbert in his "report" from Baghdad 10 days ago. "Rebuilding is for losers. Time to party! Then it's off to Syria for the next invasion."

But the relief that a viewer can take away from "The Daily Show" has less to do with its specific point of view than with its unfailingly polite but firm refusal to subscribe to anyone else's program. For those who share Andy Rooney's gloom, it's a place to find a smart take on the war that does not abide by the strict guidelines that come with either blind support or apoplectic rejection of "Operation Iraqi Freedom."

"It's so interesting to me that people talk about late-night comedy being cynical," Mr. Stewart says. "What's more cynical than forming an ideological news network like Fox and calling it `fair and balanced'? What we do, I almost think, is adorable in its idealism. It's quaint." He's not wrong. During this war, the notion of exercising cant-free speech on an American TV network, even a basic cable network, has proved to be idealistic, quaint and too often restricted to Comedy Central at 11 o'clock.